1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to personal identification, more particularly, to personal identification using biometric information such as palmprint and palm vein.
2. Description of the Related Art
Reliability in the personal authentication is key to the security in the networked society. Many physiological characteristics of humans, i.e. biometrics, are typically time invariant, easy to acquire, and unique for every individual. Biometric features such as face, iris, fingerprint, hand geometry, palmprint, signature, etc., have been suggested for the security in access control. Most of the current research in biometrics has been focused on fingerprint and facial recognition. The reliability of personal identification using facial image is currently low as the researchers today continue to grapple with the problems of pose, lighting, orientation and gesture. Fingerprint identification is widely used in personal identification as it works well in most cases. However, it is difficult to acquire fingerprint features i.e. minutiae, for some people such as manual laborers, elderly people, etc. As a result, other biometric characteristics are receiving increasing attention. The hand based biometric techniques, i.e., fingerprint and hand geometry, are most attractive in the market because of high user-acceptance.
Prior researchers have attempted to devise personal authentication systems using various biometric traits. Some researchers have also suggested the hand based measurements for the personal authentication. The US patent office has issued few patents for the devices that range from electro-mechanical devices to the image scanners and used for personal authentication. The U.S. Pat. No. 4,736,203 issued in 1988 details an electronic hand scanning device for personal identification. Prior to this two U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,576,537 and 3,576,538 were issued for personal authentication systems that were based on hand geometry based measurements.
The recent U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/347,411 details a device which is tailored for the acquisition of palm vein information. Wang et al. (Person recognition by fusing palmprint and palm vein images based on “Laplacianpalm” representation, Pattern Recognition 41(5), pp. 1531-1544, 2008) proposed to fuse palmprint and palm vein images for person recognition. Because palmprint and palm vein images contain complementary information, the experiments showed significant improvement by fusing. However, their system was composed of two separated cameras and required a time-cost registration procedure which made it difficult to apply for real-time application. Another U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/084,168 details the use of two-stage minutiae matching approach for personal authentication. The first commercial palmprint identification system was developed in 1971 which was followed by another system from IBM in 1977.